Hi I'm Philip Newey, author and editor. Here are some thoughts, ideas and other nonsense. I may, at times, express some views that offend some readers. I make no apologies for that. Read on at your own risk. Be sure to also visit my writer's page: http://philipnewey.com. I also run a manuscript services business called All-read-E: http://philipnewey.com/All-read-E.htm

Sunday, January 10, 2016

Hemingway, the App

Every now and then a
new application pops up that will claim to make you a better writer, or that
will offer to edit your work for you. Of course, MS Word itself offers to do
some of this, with its spell checker and grammar checker, and I think we all
know that the results are chequered at best.

I came across an app recently:
the ‘Hemingway App.’ It claims ‘to make your writing bold and clear’. It
does this by pointing out what sentences it considers hard to read or very hard
to read; phrases that have simpler alternatives; the number of adverbs (of
which it will specify what it considers to be a suitable number for a piece of
writing of that length); and uses of the passive voice. It is called the
‘Hemingway App’ because Hemingway is so often held up as a writer whose writing
is ‘bold and clear’, a paragon for all writers since. He is often cited by
those whose aim is the extinction of adverbs. Once you begin to look more
closely at Hemingway’s writing, of course, it becomes clear this his writing is
far from always ‘bold and clear’; nor does he particularly shy away from the
use of adverbs.

Any piece of software like this is just begging to be put to
the test, and this can be done on their web site here: http://www.hemingwayapp.com. Text can be
entered and subjected to scrutiny. Naturally, the first author anyone is going
to subject to this analysis will be Hemingway himself. Here is the opening
paragraph of For Whom the Bell Tolls:

He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the
forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the
tops of the pine trees. The mountainside sloped gently where he lay; but below
it was steep and he could see the dark of the oiled road winding through the
pass. There was a stream alongside the road and far down the pass he saw a mill
beside the stream and the falling water of the dam, white in the summer
sunlight.

The
first thing the app does is identify three out of four sentences as ‘hard to
read’. Erm, well … Either the software can’t count or it is not able to
identify sentences very well. There are only three sentences here. Perhaps the
app doesn’t know what semi-colons are. Nevertheless, it highlights the whole
passage as ‘hard to read’. Hard for whom, one wonders. It identifies ‘gently’
as an adverb and advises its removal. Really? ‘The mountainside sloped where he
lay’ would be an improvement? What mountainside doesn’t slope? So, remove an
adverb and generate a tautology. The point is that it slopes gently here and
not precipitously. The app apparently has no problem with this sentence opener:
‘There was a stream alongside the road …’ I would consider this passive,
but the app doesn’t. As an editor I would change this to: ‘A stream ran
alongside the road …’ So … not a great start for the app.

It rated this passage a ‘ten’ (good). The lower the rating,
the higher the readability, apparently. It goes up to twenty-four. Even the
lowest rating of ‘one’, however, is still only ‘good’.

Here’s a passage from a Hemingway short story:

I guess looking at it now my old man was
cut out for a fat guy, one of those regular little roly fat guys you see
around, but he sure never got that way, except a little toward the last, and
then it wasn’t his fault, he was riding over the jumps only and he could afford
to carry plenty of weight then. I remember the way he’d pull on a rubber shirt
over a couple of jerseys and a big sweat shirt over that, and get me to run
with him in the forenoon in the hot sun. He’d have, maybe, taken a trial trip
with one of Razzo’s skins early in the morning after just getting in from
Torino at four o’clock in the morning and beating it out to the stables in a
cab and then with the dew all over everything and the sun just starting to get
going, I’d help him pull off his boots and he’d get into a pair of sneakers and
all these sweaters and we’d start out.

The app gave this a grade of twenty
(poor). That it may be—we are harsh critics—but the point of including it here
is to consider adverbs more closely. I have highlighted the adverbs; I see
ten of them. The app identified one: roly. Which, of course, isn’t an adverb.
(Is it even a word without its ‘poly’ partner?) So … the software doesn’t
appear to know what an adverb is.

Finally, who could resist entering some gibberish.

Me thinks this um piece of software is crap. But it
likum this. Car happy not today. Me good writer ugh.

This (apparently) is a Grade 1 (but
still only ‘good’) piece of writing, with no issues at all. Now I understand
what I have been doing wrong.

Some might advise caution when using, or even considering
purchasing, the Hemingway App. I would never do that, of course.

[By the way, this post rated ‘seven’.
I’m not at all sure that I should be happy about that!]